Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
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40. Hillary Rodham Clinton, It Takes a Village (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 301.
41. Kaus (who once worked for Reich at the Federal Trade Commission--charged with figuring out how to rule that closing a factory was an "unfair trade practice") offers a few examples from Reich's writings. "But must we choose between zero-sum nationalism and impassive cosmopolitanism?" Reich asks. No! There is "a third, superior position: a positive economic nationalism." "American political rhetoric often frames the decision in the dramatic terms of myth: either we leave the market free, or the government controls it," Reich complains. "There is a third alternative, however." "Two fictions confound discussions of economic change in America. The first is the fiction of automatic adjustment," where layoffs have little negative impact. The "other, opposite fiction," according to Reich, is that people "never adjust to change but simply suffer." Reich claims for himself a "middle, messier ground" in which "[t]here are many options" for pragmatic, expert-driven control of the economy, using capitalism and socialism together. Mickey Kaus, "The Policy Hustler," New Republic, Dec. 7, 1992, pp. 16-23.
42. Ibid., p. 20.
43. When Reagan left office, President George H. W. Bush was ill equipped philosophically to deal with the rising clamor for a more planned economy, particularly when the recession hit (which the media exaggerated to great political effect). Once again, advocates of industrial policy dusted off arguments for a planned prosperity grounded in the moral equivalents of war. "Our principal rivals today are no longer military," George Fisher, the chairman of the Council on Competitiveness under Bush, offered in a widespread refrain. "They are those who pursue economic, technology, and industrial policies designed to expand their shares of global markets. This is the way it is. U.S. policy must reflect this reality if we are to remain a world leader and a role model." The former defense secretary Harold Brown called for "a new alliance between government and industry" to develop new technologies. See Kevin Phillips, "U.S. Industrial Policy: Inevitable and Ineffective," Harvard Business Review, July/August 1992.
44. Hobart Rowan, "Clinton's Approach to Industrial Policy," Washington Post, Oct. 11, 1992, p. H1; Paul A. Gigot, "How the Clintons Hope to Snare the Middle Class," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 24, 1993, p. A10.
45. This sort of interference has a cascading effect throughout the economy, creating even more perverse incentives for government and business to get in bed together. Because American companies are required to pay twice the global market price for sugar, most big sugar consumers--Coca-Cola, for example--use corn sweeteners in their soft drinks instead of sugar. Archer Daniels Midland makes a lot of corn sweetener, which is why it gives a lot of money to politicians who support sugar subsidies.
46. Obviously, much of this is marketing. Starbucks customers, according to a survey by Zogby International, are more likely to be liberal (and female) by a margin of roughly two to one (Republicans and men prefer Dunkin' Donuts). But one shouldn't overlook the point that if "liberals" prefer Starbucks, it is in Starbucks' interest that more people become liberal, which is why it spends so much money on what amounts to public education. Zogby Consumer Profile Finding, "Starbucks Brews Up Trouble for Dunkin' Donuts: Seattle Chain's Coffee Preferred by 34% to 30%; 'Starbucks Divide' Evident in Age, Politics of Coffee's Drinkers," August 8, 2005, http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1016 (accessed June 26, 2007).
47. Conversation with Ronald Bailey, science correspondent, Reason magazine.
48. Ned Sullivan and Rich Schiafo, "Talking Green, Acting Dirty," New York Times, June 12, 2005, p. 23; "The Profiteer: Jeff Immelt," Rolling Stone, www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/8742315/the_profiteer/ (accessed March 18, 2007).
49. See www.ceousa.org/pdfs/eeoctestimony5=06.pdf (accessed May 8, 2007).
9. BRAVE NEW VILLAGE: HILLARY CLINTON AND THE MEANING OF LIBERAL FASCISM
1. Interview on Fresh Air, National Public Radio, Oct. 18, 2005.
2. Kenneth L. Woodward, "Soulful Matters," Newsweek, Oct. 31, 1994, p. 22.
3. Ibid. Jones has stayed involved in her life. During the Lewinsky scandal he reacquainted Clinton with a sermon of Tillich's--"Faith in Action"--and served as a spiritual adviser during her 2000 Senate campaign.
4. I can find no reference to Oglesby being a theologian of any kind. The title of his article, according to Newsweek, was "Change or Containment." But it was actually "World Revolution and American Containment" and came from the SDS pamphlet by the same name. Oglesby co-wrote a book with an expert in liberation theology, Richard Shaull, called Containment and Change, which may be a source of the confusion. Clinton told Newsweek, "It was the first thing I had ever read that challenged the Vietnam War." This seems unlikely since even if she'd been reading motive and nothing else, Oglesby's article was hardly the first anti-Vietnam piece to appear in that magazine (it became known for advising young people on how to escape to Sweden to avoid the draft). In time Oglesby became something of a New Left libertarian, believing that the New Left and the Old Right were kindred spirits--or at least should be.
5. "I can no more condemn the Andean tribesmen who assassinate tax collectors than I can condemn the rioters in Watts or Harlem or the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Their violence is reactive and provoked, and it remains culturally beyond guilt at the very same moment that its victims' personal innocence is most appallingly present in our imaginations." It was Oglesby's idea for the SDS to send "Brigades" to Cuba in solidarity with the regime. David Brock, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 18.
6. Woodward, "Soulful Matters," p. 22.
7. Hillary D. Rodham, 1969 Student Commencement Speech, Wellesley College, May 31, 1969, www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Commencement/1969/053169hillary.html (accessed March 19, 2007).
8. These last comments came from a poem written by a fellow student:
My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle
For all those myths and oddments
Which oddly we have acquired
And from which we would become unburdened
To create a newer world
To transform the future into the present.
See www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Commencement/1969/053169 hillary.html.
9. P. David Finks, "Organization Man," Chicago Tribune Magazine, May 26, 1985, p. 21.
10. "Strength Through Misery," Time, March 18, 1966.
11. Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. xxi.
12. Ibid., pp. 4, 21, 13.
13. A precocious legal theorist, Reich became a professor at Yale Law School at the impressive age of thirty-two, where he taught Hillary and Bill Clinton, among others, constitutional law. Approaching his fortieth birthday, he accepted a student's invitation to spend a summer at Berkeley in 1967, which just happened to be the Summer of Love. He returned to Yale a long-haired, bell-bottom-wearing guru who wouldn't be caught dead without a string of beads around his neck. He gave up all the tradition-directed dogmas, including academic rigor. The students called one of his courses Kindergarten II because you could read or do anything you wanted. His 1970 book, The Greening of America, was not an environmental work, as the title might imply, but a quasi-religious tract on the need for American society to evolve to "Level III consciousness." Greening considered political change to be the end stage of the Level III consciousness "revolution." Change had to occur within the culture before politics could change, and within the individual before the culture could. For Reich himself, individual transformation required dropping out of the Yale faculty and wandering around as a self-described "Sorcerer" in search of meaning and authenticity amid the sketchier backwaters o
f the California counterculture. Much of the New Left followed in his footsteps.
14. It continued: "Now a new frontier must be found to foster further experimentation, an environment relatively unpolluted by conventional patterns of social and political organization. Experimentation with drugs, sex, individual lifestyles or radical rhetoric and action within the larger society is an insufficient alternative. Total experimentation is necessary. New ideas and values must be taken out of heads and transformed into reality." Daniel Wattenberg, "The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock," American Spectator 25, no. 8 (Aug. 1992).
15. Treuhaft's wife, Jessica Mitford, was a muckraking communist journalist most famous for writing The American Way of Death, an expose of the American funeral industry. Born to an aristocratic British family, she was a classic girl of privilege who fell in with rebellious radicalism. Several of her sisters were equally radical. Unity Mitford was a famous friend of Hitler's, and Diana Mitford married Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists. Unity Mitford had to leave the country, incensed that Britain would fight such a progressive leader as Hitler. Diana and Oswald were jailed for the duration of the war. Oswald, of course, always considered himself a man of the left: "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right," Mosley proclaimed in 1968. "My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics." Jessica Mitford, meanwhile, remained committed to Stalinism her entire life. When Hungarian freedom fighters were mowed down by Soviet tanks, she argued that the "fascist traitors" got what they deserved.
16. As Allan Bloom wrote, "I have seen young people, and older people too, who are good democratic liberals, lovers of peace and gentleness, struck dumb with admiration for individuals threatening or using the most terrible violence for the slightest and tawdriest of reasons." He continued: "They have a sneaking suspicion that they are face to face with men of real commitment, which they themselves lack. And commitment, not truth, is believed to be what counts." Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 221.
17. Michael Kelly, Things Worth Fighting For: Collected Writings (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 170. This profile, "Saint Hillary," first appeared in the May 23, 1993, New York Times Magazine. For reasons that may strike some as suspicious, it is impossible to find in the Lexis-Nexis database, in professional academic databases, or on the New York Times Web site. Fortunately, it appears in Kelly's posthumous Things Worth Fighting For. Sadly, and oddly, the New York Times does not consider this historic essay to be something worth saving.
18. Christopher Lasch, "Hillary Clinton, Child Saver," Harper's, Oct. 1992.
19. Ibid.
20. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), p. 235; Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 14. While she summarized the environmental position well, it's worth noting that Gilman herself was an unreconstructed racist eugenicist.
21. John Taylor Gatto writes:
A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders including Horace Mann of Massachusetts, Calvin Stowe of Ohio, Barnas Sears of Connecticut, and others visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency they saw there, attributed the well-regulated, machine-like society to its educational system, and campaigned relentlessly upon returning home to bring the Prussian vision to these shores...So at the behest of Horace Mann and other leading citizens, without any national debate or discussion, we adopted Prussian schooling or rather, most had it imposed upon them...The one-and two-room schoolhouses, highly efficient as academic transmitters, breeders of self-reliance and independence, intimately related to their communities, almost exclusively female-led, and largely un-administered, had to be put to death. (Charlotte A. Twight, Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002], p. 138.)
22. Burleigh, Third Reich, p. 236.
23. Martha Sherrill, "Hillary Clinton's Inner Politics," Washington Post, May 6, 1993, p. D1; Kelly, Things Worth Fighting For, p. 172.
24. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Remarks at University of Texas, Austin, April 7, 1993, clinton4.nara.gov/WH/EOP/First_Lady/html/generalspeeches/1993/19930407.html (accessed March 18, 2007).
25. David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 175.
26. Tom Gottlieb, "Book Tour Includes a Political Lesson," Roll Call, May 16, 2006.
27. Lee Siegel, "All Politics Is Cosmic," Atlantic Monthly, June 1996, pp. 120-25.
28. Michael Lerner, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1997), pp. 13-14.
29. Tikkun, May-June 1993.
30. Lerner, Politics of Meaning, p. 226; Michael Lerner, Spirit Matters (Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads, 2000), p. 325.
31. Lerner, Politics of Meaning, p. 58.
32. Ibid., p. 59.
33. Ibid., pp. 88, 91.
34. Among the points he fails to grasp is the fact that the left has always been about constructing communities; that the right-wing movements he identifies are not necessarily fascistic; or that he is employing the classic liberal tactic of calling the "other" "fascist." Indeed Lerner writes, "The delegitimization of the notion of a possible 'we,' who could act from shared high moral purpose and could achieve morally valuable results, is the number-one goal of the conservative forces in America's elites of wealth and power." Ibid., p. 318.
35. In the former he offers an interesting interpretation of liberal history in order to persuade liberals to reconnect with the old Progressive Social Gospel mission. "With the rise of fascism," he writes, "the American religious Left abandoned the Social Gospel of its pre-World War II past, with its cheery hope of steady progress toward the Kingdom of God." He identifies the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as the culprit behind this move because he convinced liberals to take seriously the threat of Nazism. "For Niebuhr and the Christian realists who rallied around his writings, sinfulness required recognizing the limitations of any politics aimed at fundamental social change, accommodating the inequities of their own capitalist societies and championing the Cold War. The Christian 'realists' helped reinforce individualism when they focused religious energy away from social movements." Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 164.
36. Lerner, Politics of Meaning, pp. 219, 283.
37. Charles Krauthammer, "Home Alone 3: The White House," Washington Post, May 14, 1993, p. A31.
38. "By the Dawn's Early Light," National Review, Jan. 22, 1990, p. 17.
39. Norman Lear, "A Call for Spiritual Renewal," Washington Post, May 30, 1993, p. C7.
40. John Dewey, "What I Believe," Forum 83, no. 3 (March 1930), pp. 176-82, in Pragmatism and American Culture, ed. Gail Kennedy (Boston: Heath, 1950), p. 28; Adolf Hitler, Hitler's Table Talk, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens, introduction and preface by Hugh Trevor Roper (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), p. 143.
41. Indeed, O'Rourke argued that It Takes a Village is a fascist tract in 1996. He wrote:
If a name must be put to these stupid politics, we can consult the Columbia Encyclopedia under the heading of that enormous stupidity, fascism: "totalitarian philosophy of government that glorifies state and nation and assigns to the state control over every aspect of national life." Admittedly, the fascism in It Takes a Village is of a namby-pamby, eat-your-vegetables kind that doesn't so much glorify the state and nation as pester the dickens out of them. Ethnic groups do not suffer persecution except insofar as a positive self-image is required among women and minorities at all times. And there will be no uniforms other than comfortable, durable clothes on girls. And no concentration camps either, just lots and lots of day care. (P. J. O'Rourke, "Mrs. Clinton's Very, Very Bad Book," Weekly Standard, Feb. 19, 1996, p. 24)
42. Hillary Rodh
am Clinton, It Takes a Village (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 13.
43. Ibid., p. 14.
44. Lear, "Call for Spiritual Renewal," p. C7.
45. Clinton, It Takes a Village, p. 20.
46. Ibid., pp. 299, 301.
47. Paul A. Gigot, "How the Clintons Hope to Snare the Middle Class," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 24, 1993, p. A10.
48. Howard Fineman, "Clinton's Brain Trusters," Newsweek, April 19, 1993, p. 26.
49. Jacob Weisberg, "Dies Ira: A Short History of Ira Magaziner," New Republic, Jan. 24, 1994, p. 18. Even the Swedish embassy couldn't get a copy when it asked for one on behalf of Fortune magazine.
50. Jonathan Rauch, "Robert Reich, Quote Doctor," Slate, May 30, 1997, www.slate.com/?id=2447 (accessed Jan. 19, 2007). See also Robert Scheer, "What's Rotten in Politics: An Insider's View," Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1997.
51. Rauch, "Robert Reich, Quote Doctor." See also Robert Reich, "Robert Reich Replies," Washington Post, June 5, 1997, p. A21; Thomas W. Hazlett, "Planet Reich: Thanks for the Memoirs," Reason, Oct. 1997, p. 74.
52. Jonathan Chait, "Fact Finders: The Anti-dogma Dogma," New Republic, Feb. 28, 2005; Herbert W. Schneider, Making the Fascist State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 67.
53. Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2004), p. 92; Clinton, It Takes a Village, p. 200.
54. Mickey Kaus, "The Godmother," New Republic, Feb. 15, 1993, p. 21; Kay S. Hymowitz, "The Children's Defense Fund: Not Part of the Solution," City Journal 10, no. 3 (Summer 2000), pp. 32-41.
55. James Bovard, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), p. 68, citing U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition, Feb. 1972.
56. Hymowitz, "Children's Defense Fund," pp. 32-41.
57. Lasch, "Hillary Clinton, Child Saver" Hillary Rodham Clinton, Address to the General Conference, April 24, 1996, www.gcah.org/GC96/hilltext.html (accessed Feb. 6, 2007).